So, you want to migrate to the Cloud? Well, challenges accepted!

DateOctober 25, 2018

As the product owner of our internal CRM at PowerObjects, I’m privileged to practice one of our Guiding Principles – Live the Technology – every single day. For us, that principle means always using the latest and greatest technology, practicing what we preach, and consistently walking the talk. As such, it only makes sense that, given the tremendous growth of cloud technology, we would move our own internal CRM to the cloud.

Before setting off on the journey, we recognized and accepted the reality that there would certainly be unexpected hurdles. Regardless of an organization’s experience and preparation, no project of this magnitude ever goes off without a hitch or two (or ten). Knowing this ahead of time, we must ask ourselves three important questions every time we’re faced with a new challenge:

Are we creating a scalable future in the cloud?

Are we creating sustainable and supportable processes?

Are we empowering our project team to make decisions?

From my perspective as product owner, the answers to these questions guide our strategic approach and decision-making in terms of finding the right solutions.

Another of our guiding principles is Do the Right Thing, which means never compromising our integrity. With that in mind, we felt it was only right to be completely transparent during this migration. We’ve been sharing our story, warts and all, every step of the way. And today’s installment of the story is all about the challenges we’ve faced in the first several months. Fortunately, having helped hundreds of clients in similar projects, we’re equipped with the knowledge and experience to tackle them head-on…

1. Challenge: Even the best-laid plans inevitably change.

This initiative has forced us to analyze our D365 instance holistically. It’s far larger and more complex than anybody had known. Our end-to-end journey to the cloud will be a long one and we will need to be strategic about what parts of the system we migrate and when. Resourcing the effort and managing the disruption to business operations are the biggest risks.Solution: Complete the road-mapping process. It is so important!

2. Challenge: Even the most carefully-designed roles inevitably change.

In a fast-growing global enterprise with new and changing roles, the prospect of engaging the right business decision-makers in the right area of the business at the right time is a daunting challenge, indeed.Solution: Hold stakeholders accountable for identifying and protecting the right business decision-makers.

3. Challenge: Determining what gets moved to the cloud and what gets upgraded during the move.

Every department and each team has functionality within an application that is critical to their specific work, which raises difficult questions that need carefully considered and coordinated answers. Things like, what do we move first? What’s next? Do will simultaneously upgrade? These are big questions requiring difficult decisions.Solution: Identify “Most Valuable Processes” and design strategy around the business-critical paths.

4. Challenge: Allocating resources to complete the necessary work.

No resources are 100% dedicated to this effort – everyone involved in the project has other projects, priorities, and responsibilities.Solution: Include our Internal CRM Support Team in the migration, so the team can help build what they will ultimately support.

5. Challenge: How do we ultimately respond to all the changes to the scope and process of our migration?

Knowing that our migration will be a multi-year project that requires our Internal CRM Support Team to support and maintain both our On-premises and Cloud deployments until we are 100% migrated, the waterfall approach may not serve us best in this project – especially considering the rapid growth of our organization. So, now what?Solution: Scrum – a light-weight, agile approach to our migration that allows us to respond to change more effectively.

As you can hopefully see, we at PowerObjects truly understand and appreciate the fact that migrating to the cloud is a challenge. We’re living proof! And it’s our awareness that makes us the perfect partner to help you face these and other challenges. Our experience and expertise practically ensure we can resolve whatever issues arise during your migration.

In life as at work, change is hard! PowerObjects totally gets it. The important thing to remember is that with the right team asking the right questions, no challenge is too difficult. That’s why we’re offering a free, 4-hour risk assessment to help you get on the right track for your own upgrade. Reach out today to reserve your spot!

Happy D365’ing!

Prev Post

Hear from the Stakeholders!

Related

Evaluation Process

3 Common Concerns (and why you needn’t be concerned) about Moving to the Cloud

Evaluation Process

Making the Change to a Scrum-Driven Process: Q&A with our Product Owner

Are you Considering Moving from On-premises to Online?

About Our D365 Migration Story

At PowerObjects, one of our guiding principles is to Live the Technology. That ideal has helped us become a leading Global Systems Integrator for Microsoft Business applications through the lens of Microsoft Dynamics 365. This has kept us busy at work helping customers achieve their Cloud vision. So, what’s next for us? Well, we set our sights on the skies, sort of, as we make our own move to the Cloud.

PowerObjects is migrating our existing on-premises Dynamics platform to Dynamics 365 Online. We’ve always said that we are our BEST case study for Dynamics success, and by taking advantage of the robust online features, marketing automation capabilities, and reporting functionality (just to name a few), our goal is to prove even further how passionate we are about Dynamics 365 as a business application.

Follow us on our migration journey in this interactive microsite. We’ll be providing updates, behind the scenes peaks into the progress, and insight into both the highs and sometimes lows of an implementation. We hope you enjoy our story!